Why older brains stand to lose more

AGEING may cloud your financial judgement, thanks to "noise" in an area of the brain critical for predicting pay-offs.

Gregory Samanez-Larkin, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, scanned the brains of 110 men and women aged 19 to 85 with functional MRI as they played 100 rounds of a game in which they had to choose one of three possible investments.

Volunteers between 67 and 85 took longer to figure out the shrewdest investment, and activity in the striatum, a region critical to sensing reward, was more sporadic. This area only lit up strongly in some rounds, whereas in younger volunteers activation there was consistent. Samanez-Larkin suggests the fluctuating activity could act like noise, clouding someone's ability to work out the best investment (Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.4902-09-2010).

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